An unreleased feature on Spotify, called “Tastebuds” is designed to let you discover new music through your friends’ lists by curating a playlist based on your and your friends’ similar tastes in music.
Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher who unlocks new features before they launch, tweeted screenshots of the unreleased Tastebuds feature on Wednesday, December 18. Based on Wong’s screenshot, the Tastebuds tab would be located in Spotify’s main navigation. The feature’s description says, “Now you can discover music through friends whose taste you trust.”
Spotify is working on Tastebuds, letting users discover music through their friends pic.twitter.com/uqUXmRvEKo
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) December 18, 2019
There’s not much else known about the feature since Spotify hasn’t officially confirmed it yet. Digital Trends reached out to Spotify to confirm or deny the Tastebuds feature and to find out more about it. We will update this story once we hear back.
Tastebuds is similar to the Friends Weekly playlist that the music streaming service previously tested. The playlist, which was never officially released was comparable to the Discover Weekly playlist, except that Friends Weekly was specially curated with songs recently listened to by your friends.
You can already see what your friends are listening to with the Friend Activity tab. The feature shows what friend or public profiles that you follow are listening to in that moment.
The Tastebuds feature looks to be a significant move by Spotify to incorporate more social sharing on the platform. You can already share what song you’re listening to on your Instagram story, and Spotify’s year-end roundup called Unwrapped gained traction on social media platforms where people used it to share the artists, songs, and albums they listened to most this past year.
Spotify is also testing a real-time lyrics feature within the mobile app to enable a karaoke-like experience. There is reportedly an option to watch the lyrics on full screen, which should make it easier to sing along with them.
Spotify (which offers Premium Subscription) remains the global champ when it comes to music streaming services. The service has over 100 million subscribers worldwide and has over 30 million songs within its catalog. In comparison, Spotify’s closest rival, Apple Music, has about 60 million monthly subscribers but has a more extensive inventory of about 45 million songs to listen to.
